Switch your business phone line to digital

The public switched telephone network or the phone network as many people know is about 150 years old. It's at the end of its life and we need to close it down.

If it goes down now, it's doom and gloom because everybody's panicking. All the customers are panicking. We're panicking because we can't take card payments. We didn't understand exactly what that meant in terms of the scale and the scope and the services affected.

The telephone network as we know it today is about 50 years old. So the equipment is becoming really old and that equipment is no longer produced. We rely on spares to fix the network but also that network has become more fragile.

So over time we've now got more faults. So particularly in the summer where we've had this really hot weather and in the winter when we get lots of rain for example, it tends to fault more. So we need to remove the network. It's incredibly fragile. We're running out of spares to fix it.

The PSTN is about 60% less reliable than our fibre networks. There's still a lot of really important customers connected to this network today. So vulnerable customers and critical national infrastructure services. Moving these important customers onto more reliable networks is really important.

Businesses use the telephone network a lot, more than you would realise. The telephone network is used for things like payment machines in card terminals in shops. It's used for alarm services but it's also used for really important things like switchboards.

We had one incident a few years back before we went onto broadband that a lorry backed around the corner just around here and backed straight into the pole. Knocked it clean over and we had no phone or internet for three weeks until they fixed it.

There's no way you could take any card payments. There was a lot more cash around then than there is now. There's no cash around now hardly. So we couldn't take payments, you had to just rely on - I had to make a sheet up, an A4 sheet with all their details on, their card details and then put it in later on when it came back on. It was a trust thing really with people. It is very trusting trade, most of it.

If it goes down now, it's doom and gloom because everybody's panicking. All the customers are panicking. We're panicking because we can't take card payments. The till doesn't even sync up. Like you've got people looking at you and saying, "I need to make a payment, I need to make a payment." They can't do it.

Some do phone you back in an hour or two later and pay up. But it is an issue. It's a massive issue if the till goes down now. I don't know how we would cope because mobile phone signal doesn't come through the building because of having thick walls and that. So we'd be lost completely. I don't know how we'd cope at all.

One of the things we try to do is make sure that we reached out to all the local authorities in the whole of the UK. And that includes the fact there's some 240 different councils and you're talking about county councils, unitary councils, metropolitan councils and even parish councils.

And over that time, we have had a range of responses. At one end, there are local authorities who have been absolutely fantastic. They're all over this. They look at their community and say, "We've got to protect our community. We want to work with you and do that." And that's been absolutely fabulous.

At the other end, there's been perhaps some that have said, "Well, it's not really our business. We don't want to get involved." And you can understand that to some extent, because you're giving them a problem they didn't have before and everything really in between.

After five years now doing this, in some cases, people have just changed jobs. And there haven't been handovers. There have been people calling me now saying, "Well, what's this all about?" First I've heard about it. My predecessor left, didn't do a handover to me. Can you tell me what the PSTN switch off is?"

And we're talking nearly now, in just a couple of weeks, but 100 days to go - working days to go and they're running out of time.

2009, Wiltshire Council became Unitary, so that was four district councils and one county council. So we had a lot of old historical data to deal with. So that was, first of all, our biggest problem.

The other thing is that, although you will get information from your communication provider, it doesn't usually include any address details. So you'll have a reference number, you'll have a telephone line, but you won't have any information about what it is. And depending on its usage, that can be quite scant. In some cases, you only had a grid reference. So, very patchy, and it certainly needed a bit of investigation.

What we found when we started looking into this is, they're not just used for network communication lines. They are air monitoring. They are traffic lights. They are lifts. There are all sorts of contexts and usages which you just wouldn't have considered or thought about. So that was our biggest problem, once you understand how big it is and how much it's used, the scale rose exponentially.

When I was allocated the project, it was May 2022. So quite a while ago. At that point, the switch off deadline was December 25. So we had just over three and a half years to address all of our PSTN lines.

Like most people, I guess I considered PSTN for what it said on the tin - public switch telephone network. I considered it was probably a telephony refresh, update, modernisation, however you want to call it.

We've got more than 200 sites in our estate. We had more than 1,200 lines on my original audits that I pulled together. I did the number crunching. So, at that point, I quickly realised it was about roughly one line per day I needed to address for the next three and a half years to get the numbers down to where we needed them to be.

Our scope that we were given was Salisbury Exchange. The interesting thing about that is you'd think, well, what does that actually cover? You'd be surprised. We did eventually get a map of the areas that covered, but it wasn't a nice big circle around Salisbury. It peaked off into some very unusual areas, so you had to break it down into individual STD codes to be really sure about what the scope of the work was.

So the first thing you should be aware of is your exchange doesn't necessarily cover a neat geographical area. You're really careful and sure about what is included within that and what it covers.

This was all about focusing our organisation together in terms of the scope and scale of the problem and that joint responsibility. It'd be easy to think of this as purely an ICT problem because it was network lines. It was far from this. It was about service delivery and service delivery is something that affects the entire organisation in our case.

The data that I originally pulled together came from many different sources. It quickly became apparent that it didn't marry up. There was a lot of inaccuracies. I think part of the problem was that information was so static. It hadn't been touched for years. Some of the information was really patchy.

I remember almost pulling my hair out that I was looking at spreadsheets and sometimes all I had was a telephone number. I've spent time picking up the phone hoping that somebody would answer. I've spent time Googling numbers as well. It almost felt like being a detective at some points.

There was one occasion where I called a lift alarm and the receptionist of the building picked up the phone, very surprised that somebody had rung it. That had never happened before. But that was useful because we'd identified the use of that line. But on the spreadsheet, that line was not being used.

We also had situations that we had lines specifically into our highways depots. Those lines were for snow control rooms. Obviously we only experience snow in the winter. So if those usage stats were collected during the summer, they would show no usage.

We also found that there were lines that had been originally commissioned for a particular purpose - fax lines being a key one. Staff in offices had often taken it upon themselves to repurpose those lines.

So it might have said on the spreadsheet that it was a fax line. Naturally we would have already moved away from faxes. You would think that those lines could be decommissioned straight away. That often wasn't the case because they were often being used for voice communications. People had just decided that a line was there and they were going to use it.

From approximately 660 lines that we were dealing with at the start, we're now down to almost single digit numbers in terms of the work that's done.

So we're working at the moment with different directorates who've got their own line responsibilities. Traffic lights are an example of those. Sheltered housing is an example of those. But they've got programs in place that are mindful of that 2027 deadline and are working to it.

So they phased their work over multiple years to account for their budget and resource to make sure that they can get their work changed over. We're fully aware of the lines that we've got and we've got a good sort of program in place to make sure they're changed.

It's been a long journey. We're still on the journey. But I'm pleased to say we can see the end of the road.

As it stands today, I think we've got about 80 lines remaining. I'm pleased with that number, given the time that we've got left, which is about five months. I've got plans in place for each and every one of those lines. I know what they do. I know how we're going to address them and I know that we're going to do it within the timescale.

So the deadline for the PSTN closure is fixed. It's January 2027 and there are several reasons for that. Primarily because the equipment is old and failing and we just can't get the spares. So we can't run the network any longer. It needs to close.

EVAc, as our emergency fallback option is really there for what it says. It's an emergency fallback option. We will only be able to manage so many customers and we will prioritize customers to make sure that the most critical are protected through that service.

So if you're sitting there thinking, great, I'll wait for EVAc and I'll let Openreach move me to that, there is a risk that we won't be able to. So if you're a business, don't wait. Start talking to your communication or service provider now to make sure that you've got time to plan for these changes.